Terrebonne missed an early shot at hurricane levees

GOLDEN MEADOW -- The view from the top of the south Lafourche levee system says almost everything you need to know about the past, the present and the future of south Louisiana.

Marsh pocked with cankers of salt water stretches as far as the eye can see to the east and south.

West and north, it’s more bucolic. Inside the fortress of levees that has ringed southern Lafourche Parish for three decades, cow pastures, family homes and freshwater bayous dapple Golden Meadow. Inside the Larose-to-Golden Meadow levee system, the parish is making its last stand against the disappearing coast.

Lafourche and its neighbor to the west, Terrebonne Parish, make for a stark comparison, said Windell Curole, general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District.

In Terrebonne, where there is no hurricane-protection system, degrading tendrils of the five bayous wind out into the Gulf like a skeletal hand.

When Terrebonne had its first chance at hurricane protection nearly 50 years ago, the coast was cushioned with 17,000 extra miles of healthy wetlands.

"If I could have had help, Terrebonne would not be in the situation it’s in right now," said Dick Guidry, a South Lafourche Levee Board member, creator of the region’s first levee district and a former state representative from Golden Meadow.

"It’s not that we were smarter in Lafourche," he said. "We were just lucky as hell."

The story of Lafourche’s levees begins in 1965, when Hurricane Betsy pounded the Louisiana coast. Seventy-six people were killed, 164,000 homes were flooded, and the damage totaled $1.4 billion.

Extensive flooding swamped south Lafourche, an area that hit hard the previous year by Hurricane Hilda. The one-two punch made for weary, flooded residents from Larose to Leeville.

After Betsy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers redesigned levees to make them taller, 12 feet high in some cases, and stronger, using material that could withstand a Category 3 hurricane like Betsy.

The corps also proposed a large-scale levee project to protect growing industries in Lafourche. The Larose-to-Golden Meadow hurricane-protection system, a 40-mile-long levee that today encircles the east and west banks of Bayou Lafourche, was authorized by the federal government in late 1965.

At the time, Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes were divided between the Atchafalaya and Lafourche Basin levee districts -- two of the four original levee districts in Louisiana. But these mammoth districts were not handling needs at the parish level, critics said, so a new, local district was created in the hope that vulnerable coastal areas would get the projects it needed to survive.

This new district, called the South Louisiana Tidal Water Control Levee District, would have included all lands in Terrebonne and Lafourche south of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. A local tax would pay to build levees.

It also would have managed the Larose-to-Golden Meadow system being planned by the corps.

In 1968, Guidry, then a state representative, was living in Golden Meadow in a home that flooded so frequently he eventually installed a brick floor to ease post-storm cleaning. He said he knew the need for coastal protection because he lived it.

"My home flooded at least once every year for three years," Guidry recalled. "Golden Meadow would flood for days and days when just the south winds were blowing. You learned to remodel frequently."

Guidry, along with former state Rep. Dickie Talbot of Terrebonne Parish, wrote the bill that would create a new levee district.

But before the bill could work its way through the state House of Representatives, Talbot was killed in a Thibodaux car crash. Terrebonne’s first levee district followed him in death soon after.

"I called all of the local elected officials, and no one I talked to was interested in picking up where Dickie Talbot left off," Guidry said.

Guidry refused to name names because everyone involved "has died since then." But he added you just have to "check who was in office in 1968" to find out.

"I went to the Legislature a month later and created what would eventually become the South Lafourche Levee District," Guidry said, "I took Terrebonne out."

In 1970, the Terrebonne Parish Police Jury -- the predecessor to today’s Parish Council -- created a drainage district instead and set about constructing the smaller levees that exist today. The earthen dams were never intended for hurricane protection but to protect against flooding from high tides and rain.

Later, bills penned by Guidry granted the newly created south Lafourche levee district hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual payments from the Atchafalaya and Lafourche Basin levee districts. The district also received $200,000 in federal money to start work on the Larose-to-Golden Meadow system.

For its exclusion from the South Lafourche Levee District, the Terrebonne Parish Drainage District was paid a one-time lump sum of $100,000.

"The Police Jury’s No. 1 priority was drainage, not hurricane protection," said state Rep. Reggie Dupre, D-Bourg. "Unfortunately, it takes disaster before people realize true need."

Houma, the political center of Terrebonne, was still protected from potential hurricane storm surges by miles of healthy marshland, as well as barrier islands off the coast. Though these wetlands and islands would slowly erode over the years, leaving the communities more and more vulnerable, levees did not seem a pressing need to many local officials in 1970.

Today, the need is apparent.

"If you’ve got water at your doorstep, that’s a very inspirational thing," Curole said. "With the exception of Dickie Talbot, a lot of folks (in Terrebonne) just didn’t see the future need."

It wasn’t until Hurricane Juan in 1985 that Terrebonne would realize its true vulnerability. The Category 1 hurricane looped twice over the area, causing storm surges that destroyed La. 1 south of Leeville, inundated Cocodrie and Grand Isle and flooded much of Terrebonne Parish. Places that had never seen water before encountered flooding, Dupre said.

"Terrebonne did not flood a lot before 1985," he said. "But we no longer have the natural barriers and boundaries we once had south of these coastal communities. Hurricane Rita made landfall 150 miles away; we had a 9-foot tidal surge."

Morgan City only had a 2-foot tidal surge for the 2005 hurricane, and the difference, Dupre said, is easy to see.

"Morgan City still has over 15 miles of viable, healthy wetlands to the south," Dupre said. "Unfortunately, we lost so much of our barriers, we’re forced to rely on artificial barriers."

In response to Juan, Terrebonne officials created the South Terrebonne Tidewater Management Conservation District in 1987. In 2000, that district merged with the drainage district to become the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District that exists today.

Though Lafourche had authorization for its 40 miles of levees and locks, the road to construction still wasn’t easy. Money for Larose to Golden Meadow was appropriated in 1968, and the project didn’t actually break ground until 1972, after the governor leaned on the federal government and the corps, Curole said.

Larose to Golden Meadow was built using money from a local sales tax and $200,000 in oil revenue. But in the absence of more disasters, state and federal money dried up.

"We were almost deauthorized in 1982 because we couldn’t get any funding," Curole said.

The levee district continued to press the state, and with the help of three influential local businessmen, Jim Danos, Bill Ditto and Donald Bollinger, the parish was able to get $6.8 million to pay for much of the work, Curole said.

"You could call it a series of fortunate events," Curole said. "We’ve been able to make people understand the risk. Our local people donated the rights of way, and that helped to pay the parish’s 30 percent share of the levee cost."

Lafourche has only flooded once since the levees went up, during Hurricane Juan, and only because a section of the levee near Bully Camp was still under construction.

Since then, Curole said, Lafourche has been willing to tax itself to pay for improvements to the levee when federal or state money couldn’t be found. Since 1995, finding government money for projects has been particularly difficult, and locals have borne the brunt of improvement costs.

"It took 39 years to get to where we are, and we’ve had to fight and scratch for every dime we got," Guidry said.

Curole said there are a lot of similarities between the fight Lafourche put up to get Larose to Golden Meadow in place and the fight Terrebonne is currently waging for its hurricane-protection system, Morganza-to-the-Gulf.

But with more bureaucracy, bigger budgets and a competitive post-Katrina construction market, conditions have toughened.

"We never could have done what we did in Lafourche today," Guidry said. "We drained 35,000 acres of swamps. If the Environmental Protection Agency existed then, we wouldn’t have no levees."

Lafourche’s levee also was easier to design, Dupre said. Terrebonne has to work around five bayous and numerous canals, building multi-million-dollar locks and floodgate complexes on each waterway while finding ways to protect the vulnerable communities that border them.

"Lafourche is one main ridge, and you protect the people who live along that one long artery," Dupre said. "Terrebonne is spread out; that’s why Morganza is so much more expensive and challenging."

Levees make Lafourche safer from storms than Terrebonne, but there’s only so much protection they can offer.

Any levee system, especially in an area where wetland erosion is as severe as in Terrebonne and Lafourche, would not offer full protection from a direct hit from a Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane, Curole said.

Hurricane Rita nearly overtopped the south Lafourche levee system, Curole said. Levee officials found storm-water debris even at the top of the levees, and the board has been rushing to build them higher.

If water were to top the Larose-to-Golden Meadow levee, it could swamp Lafourche for as many as four to five days. Curole said this is an unfortunate consequence of any levee system, designed to keep out water but not necessarily to release it. But if that were to happen, the Golden Meadow floodgates in Bayou Lafourche would be opened for drainage, and the south Lafourche pump station is capable of running under 10 feet of water.

This is one of the reasons south Lafourche is hoping to hook up with the Morganza alignment and create a second wall of protection from Pointe-aux-Chenes to Golden Meadow. It would create a double layer of protection instead of building walls endlessly higher against these unpredictable forces of nature.

"It’s rare to get a powerful hurricane, and it’s rare to get a direct hit," Curole said. "The Gulf is getting closer to us, meaning when you have storm energy, it’s going to reach us a lot quicker."

Levees won’t save the community from a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane. It’ll take rebuilt marshes, barrier islands and oak ridges to preserve the way of life south of the Intracoastal.

Rebuilding marshes around the parish will help break damaging waves before they reach the Larose-to-Golden Meadow system, but it won’t slow a Category 5 storm. With the marshes’ continued decline, Lafourche may soon be an island, Curole said, and its continued existence would be threatened.

Even 50 years ago, it took decades of endless work, political pressure and repeated disasters to get Lafourche’s ring levee built.

Today, coastal advocates say the effects of wetlands erosion will be irreversible in a decade or less.

That means it could be too late to save communities like Leeville or Cocodrie, Curole said, citing his own family as an example of what could happen. They’ve steadily migrated north over the decades, moving from the barrier islands to Leeville to within the protective levee in Golden Meadow.

"Hopefully, we’ll start getting some help," he said. "It’s critical to move as quickly as we can. We’ve already lost unnecessarily with these delays. But without a doubt, without some serious work in the next 10 years we’ll have many, many, more problems."